THE VIENNA PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
Musical Values
A Television Commercial
‘I want to be . . . a musician.’ Those are the opening words in a television commercial for Prudential pension plans which was being broadcast in late 1992. It begins with a young man sitting back in a chair, a dreamy, wistful expression on his face, listening to music on headphones.
He is absorbed in the music; he taps his foot and bobs his head in time to it. And yet he is not completely taken up with it, for he is also thinking about what and who he wants to be (the words we hear aren’t being spoken out loud by anyone, they are in the young man’s head – something which the musical context makes seem natural, for when you listen to music you seem to leave the world of people and things, and enter one of thought and feeling. Or at least, that is one of the many experiences that music has to offer.)
Later in the commercial the young man appears as a musician. There is one episode where he is playing with his band, backed by two attractive girls. Everything is lurex and sequins; this is glamour, this is the real thing, this is what being a musician is all about . . . But the sequence is no more than a fantasy (you can tell this because, unlike the rest of the commercial, it is shot in black and white), and the picture dissolves into a scene in a shopping mall – Whitley’s shopping centre in Bays water, to be precise. The young man is still there, but his electronic keyboard has turned into a piano – and the pretty girls have turned into old women. One asks ‘Do you know “I want to be Bobby’s girl”?’ ‘Oh no,’ mutters our hero, now fully back in reality, as he settles down to play the woman’s request.
You could think of television commercials as a massive experiment into musical meaning. Advertisers use music to communicate meanings that would take too long to put into words, or that would carry no conviction in them. The Prudential commercial uses music as a powerful symbol for aspiration, self-fulfillment, the desire to ‘be what you want to be’, as the voice-over says. More than that, it uses a particular sort of music – rock music – to target a particular segment of society, the twenty- or maybe thirty-something’s. (The commercial is advertising pension plans that you can take with you from one job to another, and obviously they are of interest to people near the beginning of their careers. It is basically saying that you will probably try a number of jobs before you find the right one, and you need a pension plan that you can take with you from one job to another.) But there is something unusual about the way it does this. For while you see rock music – the young man tapping his foot as he listens to his Walkman, the band – you don’t hear it. Instead, you hear music in a watered-down version of what is sometimes called the ‘common-practice’ style, the style of Western European art music from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century: the music that record shops file under ‘Classical’, and that books on music traditionally refer to simply as ‘music’, as if there were no other kind.
The meaning of the commercial emerges out of this odd juxtaposition of the music you see and the music you hear. Rock stands for youth, freedom, being true to you; in a word, authenticity. Classical music, by contrast, encodes maturity and, by extension, the demands of responsibility to family and to society. Through music, the commercial accomplishes a kind of conjuring trick, combining both sets of values and in this way selling the advertiser’s message (you need to start planning for your old age now) to a segment of society that might be expected to be resistant to it; what the commercial is saying (though not in so many words, of course) is that you can begin responsible financial planning without selling out on your youth, freedom, and spontaneity. With its reassuring sonorities and controlled pacing (there are four balanced, unhurried phrases, the last culminating at the point where the Prudential logo appears on the screen), the music tells you that you’re safe in Prudential’s hands. But what I want to emphasize is not so much the way in which this particular commercial uses this particular music to convey meaning and value, but rather what it is about music that enables it to be used this way – which is as much as to say, what it is about music that makes it matter to us in the way it does.
You might define music as humanly generated sounds that are good to listen to, and that are so for themselves and not merely for the message they convey. (The first part of that formulation excludes the sighing of the wind or the singing of birds, while the second is meant to eliminate speech – though, to be sure, we do sometimes speak of the ‘musical’ qualities of oratory or poetry.) But the Prudential commercial makes it obvious just how much more, or maybe it would be better to say ‘other’, music is than good things to listen to. You only need to hear a second or two of music in a commercial to know what kind of music it is, what genre (classical, trad jazz, heavy metal, house) is being referenced, what sort of associations and connotations it brings with it. (I don’t mean that everyone can say that the music is heavy metal or house or whatever, but that you somehow know that the music goes with fast food or financial institutions or whatever the commercial is about – or, if it doesn’t, that it is being used ironically.) Of course, this requires the kind of familiarity that comes from growing up in a particular culture. A Japanese businessman watching a commercial in his
Because music and its associations vary substantially from place to place (like clothes used to and food still does, just about), it functions as a symbol of national or regional identity; émigré communities sometimes cling tenaciously to their traditional music in order to preserve their identity in a foreign country. (Examples include the eastern European and Chinese communities of
‘Music’ is a very small word to encompass something that takes as many forms as there are cultural or sub cultural identities. And like all small words, it brings a danger with it. When we speak of ‘music’, we are easily led to believe that there is something that corresponds to that word – something ‘out there’, so to speak, just waiting for us to give it a name. But when we speak of music we are really talking about a multiplicity of activities and experiences; it is only the fact that we call them all ‘music’ that makes it seem obvious that they belong together.
(There are cultures which don’t have a word for ‘music’ in the way that English does – so that there are different ‘music’s’ associated with different musical instruments, say, or so that music isn’t distinguished from what we would call dance or theatre.) Moreover, there is a clear hierarchy in that we regard some of these experiences and activities as more ‘musical’ than others. That is one of the things that the Prudential commercial plays on. The young man at the beginning is listening to music, but that isn’t good enough; he wants to be a musician. (There are societies where this distinction wouldn’t be intelligible, such as the Suyá Indians of Brazil, but in modern Western society being a musician is different from being someone who just listens to music.) As the commercial makes all too poignantly clear, though, there are musicians and musicians. For the young man doesn’t want to be just a shopping mall pianist; he wants to be a real musician – someone who not only plays before an appreciative, perhaps adulating, public but also plays the music he wants to play, his own music, and not what some old woman has asked him to.
